Secondary Source
“The very nature of manifest destiny, this idea of being a chosen people, was very much embedded in Americans’ ideals about themselves, about being white and about being Protestant. I think embedded in that was a real sense of this idea of spreading democracy and republicanism to this vast territory and to these peoples that were situated in these places. Now, of course, what it does is it completely undermines the people who are already there and the land systems that are already there.
In the case of Native Americans, who had their own land systems in terms of using the landscape for their agricultural and for their hunting needs, those systems were completely undermined and overrun by manifest destiny. When they encountered Mexicans prior to the US-Mexican War, throughout the war, and at the end, they found a legal regime that was very different from the US system, which had been based in this yeoman, Jeffersonian idea of the small individual farmer out settling the American West. When these two conflicting property regimes came into contact with one another, the United States very quickly, and somewhat easily, actually, replaced those legal land systems.
Today, when you fly over the United States, you’re flying from New York to Los Angeles, and you look out the plane window and you see those little squares out on the landscape, what you’re really seeing is manifest destiny. You’re seeing the United States imposing the grid—the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer and the Northwest Ordinance—onto a landscape that had very different sets of peoples, very different sets of property regimes and ideas about how to use that landscape. That idea of manifest destiny was something that drove Americans. It drove American foreign policy, it drove American domestic policy as Americans settled that space we call the American West.”
- Maria Montoya, Historian, “How Did Manifest Destiny Shape the American West?,” transcript of interview, 2012